Diet
As an athlete, you have the power to improve your performance through food. This manual will help guide you in making smart nutrition choices throughout your competitive year. The stress you endure through sport and school increases your nutrition needs. You must have plenty of the right food to compete at your highest level. Basics Eat at the right time. You should be eating frequent meals every 3-4 hours throughout your day. This will maintain your body's metabolism at a high rate by maintaining your energy stores. Eat the right foods: Carbs should be eaten throughout the day to maintain energy reserves otherwise you will feel fatigued, lean protein should be consumed for muscle growth and fat is essential but should be heavily moderated. Below is a table with guideline values of what your daily food consumption should consist of. Using myself as an example, I weigh 185lbs so during my in season heavy training, I would calculate my intake as follows: 185 lb x 18 Calories/lb = 3330 Kcal daily 185 lb x 3.0 Grams of Carbs/lb = 555g Carbohydrates daily 185 lb x .7 Grams of Protein/lb = 130g Protein daily As an athlete it's always important to set multiple short term, achieveable goals as well as long term goals so you can track your development. The values above are the minimum values for each category to maintain your bodyweight. If your goal is to gain weight you should consumed around 500 calorieTo gain more muscle mass, you' d have to consume around an extra 500 calories daily. To lose body fat, you should eat less (Around 250-500 Kcal less). Hydration Hydration is probably the single most important factor on a daily basis. Sweating is the primary way in which the body cools itself during exercise. When you lose more fluid through sweating than you gain from drinking, you become dehydrated. When you're dehydrated, your blood pressure drops so your heart has to beat faster to compensate. This can lead to heat exhaustion or, eventually, heat stroke. Always drink before, during and after exercise. Every day you should drink, minimum, half your body weight in ounces. For example, me weighing 185lbs would have to drink at least 92.5oz (2.6l) of water daily. When you train, this number will increase drastically as you'll have to take frequent sips every 15-20 minutes or so. Timing What you eat is just as important as when you eat. Here's an example day of eating with an afternoon practice session. 7am: Breakfast 9.30am: Snack Noon: Lunch 2pm: Pre-workout snack 3.30pm-5.30pm: Practice 6pm: Post-workout snack and/or Dinner 9pm: Snack You can see that one of key points is that you have to keep refueling you body to keep your energy levels and metabolism up. You want to be alert throughout the day so when it comes to performance time, you can hit the ground running. Recovery is one of the most important aspects of maintaining a high performance level. You should refuel your muscles with high carbohydrate food within 15-30 minutes of working out so you recover faster and minimise fatigue. This food could be a bowl of cereal with fruit in the morning, pasta/rice/potatoes with a protein at dinner, an energy bar or a smoothie to give a few examples.